What is Rose Creek Campground?
SR 288 leaves the Roosevelt Lake desert just east of the dam and climbs north toward the ranching town of Young through a landscape that changes from saguaro to oak to pine in forty miles; the Forest Service calls it the From the Desert to the Tall Pines Scenic Byway. About 20 miles up, where a small creek crosses the road in a grove of sycamore and oak at roughly 5,400 feet, is Rose Creek Campground: about five sites with tables and fire rings, a vault toilet and nothing else. The Salome Wilderness is west of the highway and the Sierra Ancha Wilderness east, and both are rough, little-visited country.
It is free, first come, first served, with a 14-day limit and no pass. There is no potable water, no host and no published site count; the five-site figure comes from campers’ reports. The Tonto National Forest does not publish a page for the campground; the Pleasant Valley Ranger District’s recreation sites are administered from the Payson Ranger Station at (928) 474-7900.
It is a stopping place more than a destination, the first real forest camp after the lake and the gentlest of the camps along the highway, and the one you can reach in a car without worry, because you arrive about where the pavement gives way to gravel. On a spring weekend a couple of other parties might be there; on a weeknight, nobody. What you get is a free, shaded night beside a small creek. What you do not get is water, room for a big rig or any services between Tonto Basin and Young.
How to camp Rose Creek right
Get there. Shea Boulevard to SR 87 north about 60 miles, then SR 188 southeast about 35 miles past Roosevelt Dam to the SR 288 junction. Turn left and climb north on SR 288. The first stretch is paved; the road turns to maintained gravel around the Rose Creek area and stays that way to Young. The campground is on the highway roughly 20 miles from SR 188. About two hours and thirty-five minutes from Old Town, the last half hour slow. A passenger car handles it in dry weather.
Arrive stocked. There is no gas, water or store between Tonto Basin and Young. The last reliable water fill is the Roosevelt Lake Visitor Center on SR 188. Rose Creek runs seasonally; filter or treat anything you take from it.
Bring a small rig. Expect room for a truck camper or a trailer under about 16 feet, and no turnaround for anything bigger. If it is full, dispersed camping is allowed along most of SR 288 outside the wilderness boundaries.
Pick the season. Open year-round in principle; April through November in practice. SR 288 gets snow and mud in winter and ADOT closes sections when it does, and storms can close it any time of year; check az511. Fire restrictions often ban campfires in May and June. Rose Creek is a wet-year campground: after a snowy winter or a strong monsoon the creek runs through camp and the sycamores are loud with birds; in a dry October it is a damp patch of gravel and a trickle, still pleasant, just not the picture.
Camp by the rules. Quiet hours and no generators from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. Use the fire rings only when restrictions allow. Bears are common in the Sierra Ancha; keep a clean camp and keep food in the vehicle.
Check the fire news. The lightning-caused Billy Fire burned about 27,574 acres of the Sierra Ancha south of Young in the summer of 2025 and closed SR 288 for a time. The highway and the campgrounds are open again, but expect burned slopes and check the Tonto’s alert page before you go.
Dogs. On leash, as in all Tonto developed sites.
Use it as a first night. It makes a good base before pushing up to Workman Creek Falls, the Parker Creek Trail or the Reynolds Creek group camp, all a few miles north. Skip it if you want a lake and a hookup: Cholla on Roosevelt Lake is the big developed camp, and Valentine Ridge past Young is the free pine camp at the top of the road.
The road between two wildernesses
The Sierra Ancha has been lived in for a long time and settled for a short one. Between about 1280 and 1350, Salado farmers built stone cliff dwellings in the range’s most hidden canyons, a few miles east of this highway, and left within three generations; the Salado cliff dwellings at Tonto National Monument, across the lake, are the ones you can visit. The Western Apache, who call the range Dził Nteel, Wide Flat Mountain, held it afterward and were still holding it when the Army arrived.
The ranchers who followed made the valley at the top of the road famous for the wrong reason. From 1882 to 1892 the Pleasant Valley War between the Graham and Tewksbury families was fought around Young, killing an estimated 35 to 50 people, the deadliest range feud in American history.
Federal management arrived with the dam. The Tonto National Forest was created in 1905 to protect the watershed above Roosevelt Dam, and Rose Creek, like every stream along SR 288, drains into the lake. In 1920 a 220-foot single-lane bridge put the Young road across the Salt near the lake. In the 1930s the Forest Service made the range a laboratory: the Parker Creek watershed station a few miles north opened in 1932, the high country became the Sierra Ancha Primitive Area in 1933, and in 1938 the station was renamed the Sierra Ancha Experimental Forest, which still measures how these mountains turn snow and rain into Valley water.
The road became a state highway, SR 288, in 1959. The 1964 Wilderness Act made the Sierra Ancha one of Arizona’s original wilderness areas at 20,850 acres, and the Salome Wilderness west of the road followed in 1984, which left the highway and its little campgrounds as a corridor between two roadless blocks. The state named SR 288 a scenic road in 2001. The Forest Service publishes no history of Rose Creek Campground itself, and we could not date its construction, and we will not guess.
The latest chapter is fire. On July 9, 2025, lightning started the Billy Fire about 15 miles south of Young; it burned about 27,574 acres of the Sierra Ancha, forced evacuations and closed SR 288 for weeks. The road and its campgrounds have reopened, but the range will carry the burn for decades, and ADOT closed sections again in November 2025 to repair storm damage, the kind of washout that burned slopes make more likely.
Why it matters
The Young Highway is one of the few places near Phoenix where you can still drive from saguaros to ponderosa on a road that feels like the 1950s, between two wildernesses most people never enter. Its history is the history of the Tonto Basin in miniature: Salado cliff houses, Apache country, a range war, a dam that made the forest, and research stations that still measure the water. Rose Creek is the humble entry point, a free creekside night at the bottom of the climb. For a Scottsdale visitor it is worth it if you are going up the Sierra Ancha anyway. Arrive with water and a small rig, check the road and the fire alerts, and take a weeknight.